Roy Levin, a friendly CMU alum, told us a story a couple weeks ago:
A job applicant was asked to write a 10-page description of a project he previously participated. The documentation of that project was well over a thousand pages and so he said there was no way to describe it in 10 pages… (The rest is history. :P)
Then Roy offered the following wisdom:
In a field that prides itself with the very idea of abstractions, everything can be explained in 10 pages. In fact, everything can be explained in one page. Good authors abstract the material to an appropriate level.
I suppose everyone agrees with his advice, but I wasn’t fully aware of that property of my field until he said it. I could have been doing it subconsciously before, but I do it consciously from that day on.
Yet it takes time and skill to do the abstraction right. I’ve seen positive and negative examples. In this regard, I remember a quote from Mark Twain, or Blaise Pascal, or really, Google:
I have written you a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one.
Some days I need to keep screaming in my head: I can explain this lucidly in 10 pages!
